"Your mama was the same way," Ellie says to me, not looking up from the pot. "Couldn't put Garrett down for the first three months. Carried that boy everywhere. Your daddy used to say she was going to wear a groove in the floor from pacing with him."
It's a small thing—Ellie mentioning my mother casually, like a woman she knew and loved and still carries with her.
She's the only person who does that.
Garrett doesn't talk about them.
I don't remember much about them.
But Ellie keeps them alive in these little moments, these throwaway lines that aren't throwaway at all, and every single time it hits me somewhere soft.
I take a sip of the tea. It's perfect. It's always perfect.
The three of us settle into the kitchen the way women do when the space is safe enough to breathe in—Ellie cooking with a newborn in one arm like it's nothing, Vanna sipping her tea with both hands free for the first time in hours, and me just... being here.
Not a nurse. Not Garrett's sister.
Just Leah, sitting in a warm kitchen with flour on the counter and the smell of biscuits in the oven and two women who know me well enough not to ask if I'm okay when I'm clearly not.
Vanna's telling Ellie about Waylon's pediatrician appointment when I hear boots in the hallway.
Heavy, but not loud. Deliberate.
The kind of footsteps that belong to a man who's aware of the space he moves through without needing to dominate it.
Coin appears in the kitchen doorway with a laptop tucked under one arm and his cut hanging open over a dark t-shirt.
His hair is pushed back like he's been running his hands through it—dark, almost black against the overhead light.
Those blue-gray eyes sweep the room the way they always do, touching everything, landing nowhere too long.
Then they land on me.
A flicker of something that's gone before I can name it, and then it's just Coin again—locked down, unreadable.
"Ladies," he says, and his voice is low and even and does absolutely nothing to me.
Nothing. At least, that’s what I’m telling myself.
"Coin." Ellie's the one who answers, because of course she is. She doesn't even slow down her stirring, Waylon still dead asleep in her other arm. "You staying for dinner? I'm making enough for the whole damn club, as usual."
"Can't tonight. Girls are at home." He holds up the laptop. "Just picking this up for Sadie Jo. Krypton got it running again."
His eyes flick to Waylon for a second, and something shifts in his face—something quiet and far away, like he's remembering what it felt like to hold something that small. Then it's gone.
"How's Wrenleigh's leg?" I ask, because it's a medical question and medical questions are safe when I am just a nurse making professional inquiries about a former patient.
He turns those eyes on me fully and I feel it the same way I felt it in the hospital—like a hand pressing flat against my sternum. "Healing up good. She's ready to set the cast on fire, but that's Wrenleigh."
"That sounds about right." I almost smile. "Tell her to stop sticking pencils down the cast to scratch it. I know she's doing it. It causes skin breakdown."
The corner of his mouth does that thing—that barely-there twitch that I've now seen twice and shouldn't be keeping count of. "I'll pass that along. She'll ignore it, but I'll pass it along."
"That also sounds about right."
We look at each other for a beat too long. Or maybe it's not too long. Maybe it's exactly the right amount of time and I'm the one making it weird by noticing.
"Thanks again," he says. "For everything at the hospital. Both of them—you were..." He pauses. Chooses his words the way I've noticed he chooses everything—carefully, deliberately, like he only gets a certain number per day and he's not going to waste them. "You were good with them."
